The Newest Fallout 4 Mod Comes From A Surprising Source

Gamers make a ton of mods for Fallout 4 all the time, throwing in all sorts of cool and interesting content into Bethesda's game. Well, a new modder has stepped into the scene and they're quite unlike anyone else in the scene because they aren't from a grassroots community. No, this new modder comes from a bigger pool of fish and is best known for the GPU technology. I'm talking about Nvidia.

Polygon did a write-up on the new mod called Vault 1080, which sees Fallout 4 players venturing to the swampy marshes of a post-nuclear Boston. Why the marsh? Well, there's a brand new quest-line that's being implemented in Vault 1080 that's said to be around an hour long. It centers around players investigating a church in the marsh centered around dangerous and deadly cultists. However, that may not be all of it and the truth must be uncovered to fully understand what's going on at Vault 1080.

The mod is being designed by Nvidia's Lightspeed Studios, the same minds behind a lot of the Nvidia Shield content. They've been working on the Fallout 4 mod as part of their new promotional program for the updated GTX Pascal brand of GameWorks. The new GameWorks will feature improved lighting computations, shader manipulation and performance.

The Vault 1080 mod for Fallout 4 is designed to take advantage of the new GameWorks middleware and showcase how the Pascal GPUs can improve and increase the visual fidelity of older games. They released a short teaser video featuring some of the graphical improvements implemented into Fallout 4 via the Vault 1080 mod and you can check it out below to see what they've changed.

The reality is that this doesn't even look like Fallout 4 anymore. The multi-layered shadow effects with soft-shadowing rendered across multiple surfaces with translucent light-casting from the dynamic god-rays completely alters the way the game looks. The added shadows are also represented in the dynamic ambient occlusion so that objects and the environment have added visual depth and gravitas.

For a minute, if you were never told that the game was Fallout 4 it would be easy to assume that it was maybe Wolfenstein or Metro 2033. The mod gives so much more depth to the visual atmosphere of Bethesda's open-world action-RPG than the vanilla version by miles.

I wonder if this will be the beginning of a new way for Nvidia to promote their middleware and GPU hardware? I also wonder what Bethesda thinks about the green-brand company using Fallout 4 as a promotional vehicle for the GTX 1080?

Well, regardless of the corporate politics involved, Nvidia has plans on releasing the Vault 1080 mod soon enough. Gamers attending PAX West this weekend in Seattle, Washington will be able to get a first-hand look at the new Fallout 4 mod and see the graphical improvements in action for themselves. Following the PAX West promo, Nvidia has plans on rolling the mod out to the public.